Sebi to join Account Aggregator ecosystem, says Chairperson Madhabi Buch

In a big push to make financial data available with ease and on a single platform the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said that the market regulator will be joining the entire Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem.

Sebi Chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch said: “Sebi wll be joining the Account Aggregator ecosystem. We are in implementation stage where we are exchanging data formats with our market participants.” Buch was speaking at the Manthan, an ideathon for supporting new ideas and innovations in the securities market. The conference is is being held in association with other market infrastructure institutions.

She further added that the entire trading system, depository system as well as the entire mutual fund system will soon be online in the AA systems.

AA is an RBI regulated entity that allows individuals to share and access data from one financial institution to another in a consolidated networks of account aggregators. These players have received approval to access and share data by the RBI.

AA ecosystem is a UPI moment for the lending ecosystem as it will allow sharing of data seamlessly and fast and without the need for physical documents.

Speaking on data being made available to every user Buch said: “As far as Sebi and markets are concerned, we have taken a very conscious and public decision to say that all data, which is market related data, which is in the public domain, on account of regulatory mandate, and that's a ton of it, has to be accessible and free not just to investors, but to people who can download it, access it, add value to it and make the business of it.”

She also said that this was an important step because a lot of companies which used this data had opposed giving it away to individual users.

Nandan Nilekani, chairman and co-founder Infosys, and also part of several digital projects who also spoke at the manthan, said that the securities market is seeing a third phase of technology adoption. “We are in the third phase where the account aggregator system which is getting rolled out will allow people to leverage their own data in different ways,” he said.

He further added, “Along with the real time nature of transactions, the fact that UPI will be available it means that we are going to enter a world where we will have population scale participation in capital markets with very high volume very low cost very real time and India's asset map will start shifting from physical assets like real estate and gold to financial assets.”